Aspect Ratio: What Melee and PM streams are doing wrong

This is a republishing of my original Reddit post from 2015-06-04. Imgur is imploding, so reposting here.

TL;DR: Melee is not 4:3, Melee is 73:60 (584x480). PM is not 4:3, PM is 19:15 (608x480). Make your stream layouts represent this.

First, I want to say that all of this work was inspired by mirrorbender's post “My Melee Looks Funny: An in depth breakdown of aspect ratios in SSBM for Streamers, Enthusiasts, and Players”. It really got me interested in this whole aspect ratio conundrum. I took his work, double checked it, and expanded it to Project M along with informative images.

I'll start off with my two main points:

Circles are circles
Analog video is really weird

My CRT is a 4:3 display, why shouldn't I stream with a 4:3 capture?

What a CRT shows you is not all of Melee; it cuts off the top an bottom in a process called overscan. But, a capture card captures the entire signal without overscan, showing you the extra bits cut off on a CRT.

These images are all Amarec screen shots of a 720x480 capture in a 640x480 preview. It represents the full video signal input into an overscanned CRT.

The red box throughout these images shows what a CRT will show after overscan. Just using Smash 64 to show how it is a true 4:3 game.

In this image, you can see how a CRT cuts off the top and bottom, yet leaves black pillar boxes on the sides. Your personal CRT may not show this exactly because all CRTs have different display technologies and overscan amounts. The red box here is the same as the previous image and matches up with what I see on my Sony PVM-14L5 and also my HDTV.

Project M on a CRT — Project M (raw input)

In this image, you can see that Brawl/Project M, unlike Melee, extends completely to the sides of the 4:3 CRT representation. It still leaves content on the top and bottom.

Note that the aspect ratios shown here for Melee and PM are NOT what you should use for a stream. To find that answer, we need to delve into the definition of a circle.

So what is the correct aspect ratio that Nintendo should have used? Are the Smash games alone in their weird aspect ratio nature?

Well, there's pretty much no standard for overscan amounts.

It's pretty crazy. I tried to include early, late, first-party, and third-party games here.

Two aspect ratio trends visible.

So how did I come up with these nonstandard aspect ratio numbers?

mirrorbender's research and lots of time in Photoshop. I pretty much scaled images horizontally until the circles were actually circles.

This is Melee's shield texture. There should be no debate that Melee's shield is not a circle as this is the texture ripped directly from the game. Here we can agree that circles are circles, and when a shield is not a circle, something is wrong.

Current streams

Aspect ratio of Melee on a VGBC Smash@Xanadu stream

In this and the following image, I show the layout the top streams use and why it's wrong. Don't get me wrong, I love these streams, but they assume that Melee is 4:3, which it is not. I also assumed Melee was 4:3 with my stream. It makes sense because the TV is 4:3.

Aspect ratio of Melee on a Foundry stream

In these images I overlayed a semi-transparent perfect circle rendered in Photoshop. You can see that the top and bottom line up, but the shield extends outside the edges of the circle, showing that the game is stretched too much horizontally.

Melee's shield

For this demo, I actually made a Melee hack where I replaced the shield texture with a perfectly flat circle to make this easier for myself.

The first frame (71:60), is the raw 3:2 (720x480) input scaled into a 4:3 (640x480) window using Amarec. You can see that the shield pokes out of the top and bottom, showing that the video is squished too much horizonally. The numbers are the dimensions of the shield in the image.

The second frame (4:3), shows what many streams use today. The shield is stretched out horizonally.

The third frame (73:60) makes the shield perfectly circular, making 73:60 the magic aspect ratio.

PM's shield

In PM, the shield does not have a texture as it is rendered on the spot in-game, so I could not make a hack to make this easier.

Again in the first frame (149:120), you can see that the shield is too tall. In the second frame (4:3), the shield is again too wide. And in the third frame (19:15), the shield is perfectly circular as it should be.

Melee gameplay

Melee on various aspect ratios — Melee on various aspect ratio

Here I cycle through gameplay snapshots of what Melee looks like at the raw input (wrong), 4:3 (common, but wrong), and the corrected aspect ratio.

PM gameplay

Same as above.

What should my stream look like then if 4:3 is incorrect?

Here's some of my examples.

Melee

These are literally just OBS screenshots. My Melee window is 856x704. You can see now that when it's not 4:3, you get more space for webcams and whatnot.

PM

PM screenshots on a stream layout with proper aspect ratio

Here, the PM gameplay area measures out to be 892x704, making it a bit wider than Melee. You can scale these dimensions to whatever size you use.

In OBS, to make your gameplay window scale correctly, use [ALT] to crop the black borders of the game capture, and use [SHIFT] to adjust the capture without locking to an aspect ratio.

Summary

To summarize, stream Smash games at these aspect ratios:

Smash 64 – 15:11
Melee (NTSC/PAL60)– 73:60
Melee 20XX Widescreen Mode (v3.02 and earlier, ignore for newer versions and 20XXTE) – 97:60
Brawl/PM – 19:15
Brawl/PM Widescreen – 69:40
Wii U – 16:9

Now that digital video is the standard, we don't have to deal with inconsistent analog-to-digital conversion anymore and hopefully this problem doesn't crop up anymore.

Feel free to ask questions as this stuff is stupid and confusing. If you want full resolution files of all my images to check my work, ask and I'll put up a link for download.

My goal is to at least get the big streams like Showdown Smash and VGBootCamp to fix this issue. It actually gives GimR more room for his player cams at Xanadu.